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Sandra Dallas

• Buster Midnight’s Café (1990)
• The Persian Pickle Club (1995)
• The Diary of Mattie Spenser (1997)
• Alice's Tulips (2000)
• The Chili Queen (2002)

The Diary of Mattie Spenser (1997)
St. Martin's Press, 229 pages, $21.95 hardcover, ISBN 0-312-15515-8

Mattie McCauley is as surprised as everyone else in Fort Madison, Iowa, when Luke Spenser comes to her father’s house to ask her to marry him and travel to his homestead in Colorado Territory. It’s 1865, just after the Civil War, and, at the age of 22, Mattie has resigned herself to spinsterhood. A month after Luke’s initial visit, Mattie is married and has begun her journey west with the man she calls her Darling Boy—a man she barely knows.

The details of the trip west and of life in the sparsely settled territory ring true. Mattie Spenser sets out as a woman who knows her nineteenth-century place, who knows better than to criticize, correct, or question her husband. But the necessities of pioneering soon teach her to do whatever is necessary to survive. As the first woman neighbor Mattie meets in Colorado Territory tells her, "This land chews up and spits out the weak" (p. 40). The experience is an education for Mattie:
 

The events of these months have changed me from a silly girl into a woman, and one who is able to handle the trials Providence chooses to give her, I think. Pray God, it shall always be so. If Luke is not aware of my change for the better, well, I am. And I am just a little proud of myself.

But a historical novel needs more than good history to succeed; it must also be a good novel. Sandra Dallas succeeds on both counts.  She tells a good story with the addition of a subplot concerning Luke’s past and his sudden marriage proposal to Mattie. Dallas also develops Mattie as a complete character.  The paradox of characters in historical novels is that they must be both typical of their time period and unique enough to hold a reader’s interest. There is much that is typical in Mattie—her fear that life in the wild country will unsex her, her realization that people in the territories can’t stand on ceremony as much as they did back home, and her budding feminism, shared by almost every woman who has ever gone through labor: "Mother says God always knows what He is doing. Well, I may blaspheme, but God is a man. If He had been a woman, He would have made other plans for childbearing" (p. 48). But Mattie’s sense of humor rescues her from stereotypicality:
 

Who would have thought myself so anxious to claim a sod hut? I think it will be a little like living in a hole in the ground, but it has one advantage: It is dirt cheap.

When we arrived her, we slept in the wagon because we did not have a tent. (Did that make us discontented? I asked.)

The Persian Pickle Club (1995)
St. Martin's, 196 pages, $11.95 trade paperback, ISBN 0-312-14701-5

"It's funny how quilting draws women together like nothing else” (32), Queenie Bean, the first-person narrator of The Persian Pickle Club, tells us. Set in the Dust Bowl of Harveyville, Kansas, in the 1930s, the novel tells the story of a farming community hit hard by drought and the Depression.

The women of the town meet weekly for their quilting sessions, but the club is more than just a social activity. The patchwork quilts the women produce symbolize their friendship and solidarity: "There wasn't a quilt turned out by a member of the Persian Pickle Club that didn't have fabrics from all of us in it. That made us all a part of one another's quilts, just like we were part of one another's lives" (4).

The story begins when Tom Ritter, having graduated from college with an engineering degree, comes home to work on the family farm. Although Tom doesn't like farming, he feels obligated to help in his family’s struggle to survive. He brings his new bride, Rita, with him to Harveyville. Rita, also a college graduate who hates farm life, dreams of becoming a journalist.

Because of the Ritter family’s standing in the community, Rita is invited to join the Pickles. She initially feels superior to these farm women, but, once admitted into the group, she must learn not only how to sew and quilt, but also how to share in the women’s friendship. "That's what this story is about--Rita coming to Harveyville and joining the Persian Pickle Club and learning the meaning of friendship. It's about me, too, of course, and about how I never can keep my mouth shut" (17), says Queenie.

Sandra Dallas’s writing skill brings this story to life. Her eye for descriptive detail shows up in Queenie’s comment on life in the Dust Bowl: "It wasn't raining, however. It never was. The air was hot and dry and dusty. I picked up my needle and felt the grit on it. The quilt piece I worked on was smudged from the dust, and so were my hands" (9). And here’s how another Pickle describes a nine-patch quilt block to Rita: "I like to think of it like cornfields next to wheat fields" (13)—a description that any quilter will recognize immediately.

Despite their spare existence, the women of Harveyville view life with good humor. The irresistible Queenie tells us, for example, “I myself had had three dollars and a meat-loaf sandwich stolen off my kitchen table while I was in the chicken coop, and I knew it was a back-door knocker, because nobody in Harveyville except Grover [her husband] would eat my meat loaf" (20).

Oh, there’s also a bit of a mystery in the story, but the significance of the Persian Pickle Club subsumes even that. The members of my library book group all loved this story of women united to sustain themselves through a life of poverty with humor and friendship. Using women’s traditional task of needlework, these strong characters sew their lives together into patchwork that symbolizes their connectedness. There’s more than sewing at stake in their world, a place in which "The easiest way to insult a woman was through her quilts" (30).

(January 9, 2004)

Alice's Tulips (2000)
St. Martin's, 246 pages, $12.95 trade paperback, ISBN 0-312-28378-4

Alice Keeler is only 17 when she falls in love with and marries Charlie Bullock. Charlie takes Alice home to his family farm, where the newlyweds move in with Charlie’s formidible mother. And before Alice can adjust to all these changes, Charlie joins the Union Army and marches off to war against the Confederate states, leaving Alice to deal with Mother Bullock and the other women of the town on her own.

In this epistolary novel Alice reveals herself to us in a series of letters to her sister written between December 1862 and May 1865. We see Alice grow as she deals with the emotional coldness of her mother-in-law and the jealousy and envy the women of the town exhibit toward Alice because she’s an outsider—and because her needlework is finer than theirs. Communicating the entire story through Alice’s letters without making the narrative sound contrived or stilted is a big challenge for an author, but Sandra Dallas succeeds brilliantly.

On her Web site Dallas says:

Alice Keeler Bullock is the most difficult character I've created. […] You don't like her much at the beginning; I didn't like her much. But she grows; she grew on me. The challenge was to take this shallow young woman and make her into somebody readers would admire.

Alice’s Tulips gives us a look at the other side of the Civil War, the lives of the women who were left behind to work the farms and try to survive while the men were off to war. I’ve read this book with two different book groups, and it was a hit with both.

(January 9, 2004)

 

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